The Standard’s news roundup gives you a quick hit of interesting, sometimes irreverent, and breaking news stories from all over the state.
When it comes to which U.S. cities are safest for women, Houston is one of the worst. Miami ranked as the least safe place for women out of 261 cities – Houston had the distinction of being number 260 on that list.
The Houston Press reports that the study from the consumer data group, ValuePenguin, looked at 31 metrics. They included things like the rates of rape and sexual violence, the number of reproductive health clinics per capita and access to paid family leave.
But Houston wasn’t the only Texas city that tanked: San Antonio and Dallas came in at 206 and 212, respectively.
Laura Bush was in the state capital on Tuesday to stump for butterflies – the former first lady called on Texans to step up and protect the dwindling monarch butterfly population.
The orange and black beauties flit through Texas twice a year. But over the last ten years, the number of monarchs making the journey through the Lone Star state has dropped by 80 percent.
Bush’s organization, Texan by Nature, is pushing Texans to become “monarch wranglers.” The program encourages residents and businesses to make the state more hospitable to butterflies by doing things like planting native species.
Musician Amaan Shaikh made a simple joke on Facebook: if he had a dollar for every time he had listened to the song “Closer” from The Chainsmokers, he’d be able to buy the Range Rover the song references.
Jessica Hamilton, social media manager for the Houston Chronicle, says one Texas student who saw the post wasn’t buying it – University of Houston engineering student Connor Oliver was working on his math homework when the post popped up and he decided to turn it into an equation.
“He looked at when the song was released, how long the song is, so he did the whole thing and did the math,” Hamilton says. “And he said if you had listened to the song back to back from when the song came out, you would not be able to afford this. Because he looked at the average price of Range Rover and he said, so you would need to listen to the song 41,800 times.”
To reach that goal, you would need to listen to that song all day every day for 118 days.
